William Manning (author)

William Manning (1747-1814) was a self-educated New England farmer who, in 1798, wrote The Key of Liberty to criticize the Federalist elite's endangerment of free government.

Biography
William Manning was born in Billerica, Massachusetts in 1747, and he worked as a farmer before serving in the militia during the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he came to believe that his service meant little to the elites, and he wrote The Key of Liberty in 1798. He believed that the elites endangered free government, and he became a Democratic-Republican due to his distrust of the elitist Federalist Party. His controversial work was not published until a century later.